In the last few years, the would-be global elite have been fighting a losing battle to keep the public's attention away from the conference. By 2008, hundreds of protesters showed up to the site of the conference in Virginia... This year in the UK there are expected to be hundreds if not thousands attending a “Bilderberg Fringe Festival,” a type of counter-conference that is taking place as close to the venue as the police and security will allow.
The annual Bilderberg meeting kicked off this past Thursday in the unlikely-seeming location of Watford Junction in Hertfordshire in the UK. For those not in the know, Bilderberg is the annual meeting of 130 or so of the most important members of global finance, business, politics and royalty, and, according to the mainstream media, it doesn't exist.
Or at least it didn't exist until relatively recently. From the first meeting in 1954 until the early part of the last decade, the number of times the meeting was mentioned in a mainstream news publication could be counted on one hand. For the vast majority of the public, this means that they lived through the latter half of the 20th century blissfully ignorant that an annual conference of the importance and prestige of Bilderberg even took place. For a few rare researchers who happened to be in the right place at the right time, that meant that they stumbled into the biggest story of their career largely by accident.
Researchers like Jim Tucker. In 1975 he came to Washington as a fresh-faced young reporter to begin work for Spectator Magazine, the forerunner to the American Free Press. In what turns out to be a familiar refrain for Bilderberg veterans, at first he couldn't believe that such a group even existed. He had cut his teeth as an Assistant News Editor in a small town daily where he had the news wires twittering in his ear 24/7. Surely, no such conference could be taking place without word of it coming across the wires. To his utter shock, he discovered it was all true; a meeting of some of the richest and most powerful people in the world took place every year near a major North American or European capital under a total media blackout. What followed was a decades-long quest to shed light on the group and its activities, following them around the globe, visiting the site of the conference year after year, and working with carefully cultivated sources to shed light on the group's deliberations. For much of that time, Tucker's work must have seemed an exercise in futility, a lone reporter traveling the globe, writing his reports for a tiny section of the public amidst the deafening vacuum of the mainstream media's silence.
Another researcher who stumbled onto the group largely by accident is Tony Gosling. In 1996 he had a chance conversation with a man who told him that a group called “Bilderberg” was running the western world from behind the scenes. Intrigued enough to take down the name, Gosling later ran “Bilderberg” through the Reuters database. As he told me in a 2009 interview for my website, “The stuff that popped up was enough to make your toes curl.” Specifically, what popped up were a series of “confidential” press releases about the group. Exactly what the point of a press release that was not intended for publication was was not clear to Gosling, but nonetheless he took the press releases and the lists of names that he found and posted them on the internet on a website he founded for the purpose, Bilderberg.org. Ever since, he has dedicated much of his time to chasing down the group, discovering their meeting venue each year, exposing their discussions and exploring their roots and origins.
That researchers like Tucker and Gosling managed to persist in researching the group despite the nearly total media blackout on its existence is a testimony to their tenacity and perseverance as much as it is to the complicity of the media in hiding the meeting and its agenda from the public's attention. The earliest report ever published about the group was penned by iconic American journalist Westbrook Pegler—who didn't even know the group's name—in 1957, an impressive enough feat considering the fact that the secrecy surrounding the conference was even greater at that time than in recent years. From the publication of Pegler's article in 1957 until Tucker began chasing the Bilderbergers in the mid-1970s, virtually nothing was written about the conference or its attendees. Likewise, until Gosling put the first documents related to Bilderberg online in 1996, there was virtually no outlet for the average person to discover anything about Bilderberg. But sometime between the dawn of the online age and the current time, a sea change has taken place in public perception and understanding of the group.
One of the first breakthroughs came in 2001, when establishment hack Jon Ronson (who would later go on to pen the book behind the Hollywood flick The Men Who Stare At Goats) published details of his conversation with Bilderberg co-founder Denis Healy in The Guardian, one of the most widely-read newspapers in Europe. The article confirmed for the first time in such a wide venue not only that the group existed, but various details of its operations: that the conference venue was selected each year by the steering committee; that the host country's steering committee members were responsible for raising the money for the conference from member corporations (Xerox, Heinz, Fiat, Barclays and Nokia were specifically listed in Ronson's article); that the conference includes two morning and two afternoon sessions, except on Saturdays where all sessions take place in the evening so the participants have time for golf. It also helped to dispel an old canard that is still pulled out to this day: that Bilderberg is just a “talking shop” and not an important meeting at which global policies are discussed and enacted.
"During the Falklands war, the British government's request for international sanctions against Argentina fell on stony ground,” one of Ronson's Bilderberg sources told him. “But at a Bilderberg meeting in, I think, Denmark, David Owen stood up and gave the most fiery speech in favour of imposing them. Well, the speech changed a lot of minds. I'm sure that various foreign ministers went back to their respective countries and told their leaders what David Owen had said. And you know what? Sanctions were imposed."
In 2003, BBC Radio 4 aired a half hour program, “Club Class,” that introduced a large swathe of the British listening public to the group. Naturally the documentary played up the “conspiracy theory” angle, but it did release some very important information about the group, including the first audio interview with one of the participants and even details of uncovered documents showing that the group had been angling for the creation of a European Union from at least the 2nd ever year of its existence, 1955.
In 2005, the BBC website published an interview with Bilderberg chairman Etienne Davignon. The entire article focused on Davignon and his repeated denial that there is anything conspiratorial or untoward in the richest and most powerful businessmen meeting with the most influential politicians behind closed doors for four days each year. "I don't think (we are) a global ruling class because I don't think a global ruling class exists. I simply think it's people who have influence interested to speak to other people who have influence," he was quoted as saying in one of the most blatant non-denial denials of all time. "There will always be people who believe in conspiracies but things happen in a much more incoherent fashion,” he told the dutiful stenographers at the Big Brother Corporation. Keep in mind this was the same man who would blithely admit 4 years later that the Euro currency was hatched and hammered out at Bilderberg in the 1990s.
In 2006, Alex Jones' documentary cameras helped bring media attention to Ottawa, where the event was taking place. After being detained by Canadian customs upon his arrival in Ottawa, Jones and his Infowars crew helped to generate buzz around the event, and it was even covered in some of the local papers, including the Toronto Star. The footage of the protest outside the conference eventually ended up in Jones' 2007 documentary, Endgame, fostering an even greater awareness of the group.
In 2009, the Guardian sent a comedy writer, Charlie Skelton, to Greece to cover the group. What began as a light-hearted send-up of a “conspiracy theory” road trip descended quickly into conspiracy reality as Skelton was hounded by secret service agents, accosted by police, and nearly suffered a breakdown dealing with the security surrounding the event. The articles generated even more interest in the group and its activities and made Skelton into a committed anti-Bilderberg campaigner who now attends the event each year (and writes about it for The Guardian).
In the last few years, the would-be global elite have been fighting a losing battle to keep the public's attention away from the conference. A decade ago only a few grizzled Bilderberg veterans like Tucker or Gosling or Daniel Estulin would show up at the site of the conference, generally to take pictures of the attendees as they pulled into the hotel and try to suss out details of what was being discussed inside. By the time Jones and crew covered the meeting in 2006, a handful of protesters were on hand to cheer on his now-famous bullhorn rant outside the hotel. By 2008, hundreds of protesters showed up to the site of the conference in Virginia, sporting high-tech megaphone equipment that rattled the windows of the hotel as the Bilderbergers tried to get down to business. This year in the UK there are expected to be hundreds if not thousands attending a “Bilderberg Fringe Festival,” a type of counter-conference involving speakers, musicians and performers that is taking place as close to the venue as the police and security will allow.
The shift in the narrative of the mainstream media regarding the conference is palpable. Despite (repeated) exposure by the BBC, the Guardian, and other outlets, even as little as 2 years ago local BBC presenters were still able to deride talk of the group as equivalent to belief in “interstellar lizards.” This year in an unprecedented move Sky News actually conducted an interview with MP Michael Meacher from the security perimeter of the hotel itself. In the interview, Meacher argued passionately against the secrecy and security surrounding the event and deftly deflected the anchor's repeated attempts to downplay the conference's significance.
As I pointed out in one of my most recent podcast episodes, the plain truth is that the cover has been blown off of the Bilderberg conference. It may take a few years before the mainstream media “catches up” and begins talking about the event as something potentially significant, but the writing is on the wall for the global parasites: anonymity at Bilderberg is no longer assured, and association with the group may well just lead to uncomfortable questions down the road from the growing number of informed, independent, online, grassroots citizen journalists who have no compunction about sticking microphones in Bilderberg attendees' faces and asking them uncomfortable questions.
One of the consequences of this is that Bilderberg's importance as a global policy setting event is almost certainly in decline. While attendees in the past could reliably count on the shroud of secrecy and the media's complicity in covering up the event, the tide has shifted enough that one can safely assume that all precautions are now being taken to ensure “plausible deniability” about conversations behind Bilderberg's closed doors. Attendees, aware of the growing phenomenon of leaks and whistleblowers from within their own ranks, won't be able to speak as freely there as they have in the past, meaning that they will probably just conduct their main business elsewhere...or at least behind a further set of closed doors on the “inside of the inside” of the conference (think of G. Edward Griffin's presentation on the “Quigley formula” of “rings within rings” and the structure of secret societies).
But we should not lose sight of the fact that this exposure is still a major victory. Just because the psychopaths at the top are not going to give up and stop conspiring does not mean that the exposure of Bilderberg has been futile. In fact, it can be seen as one part of a much larger shifting of the tide that is happening right now on a range of issues. MPs are giving interviews about Bilderberg to Sky News. Yahoo! News published an article pondering whether the Boston bombing was a false flag event. The gun control proposals in the wake of Sandy Hook fell flat before they even got off the ground.
Any way you slice it, the alternative media, empowered by the internet, is having an incredible effect right now re-shaping the mainstream discourse and bringing once-taboo subjects out into the open. The light of public scrutiny is shining for the first time into some of the darkest corners of the power pyramid, and the cockroaches are beginning to scurry. It's important to recognize this for the victory that it is, because for the first time in decades it seems we are on the verge of a real paradigm shift in public perception that could push back the tide of global control that has been washing in virtually unimpeded for generations.